I'll Tell You When I get There...

I'm sitting here writing this as I wait for DCUO to patch. I want to log in and check out the new "narrative-focused" update, Light and Rain: Day of Reckoning, the video for which makes it look rather intriguing, if not much like the DCUO I'm used to. I'll embed it a little further down so you can judge for yourself.

I feel like I do an awful lot of that, these days. Sitting and waiting for things to patch. Or update. Or install. Or verify. Or validate.

Recent posts here have seen a litany of moans and complaints from me about not being able to find the time to play games as much as I used to, or as I'd like, but among the many reasons I've given, I don't think I've mentioned - and I'm certain I haven't sufficiently emphasized - the cumulative effect of  modern update procedures, particularly on Steam.

I think I did mention it once and someone in the comments put it down to the way Unreal 5 works, although I might have imagined that. Anyway, it doesn't seem to be limited to games using UE5. Almost everything I ever have to update on Steam feels like it takes significantly longer than it used to and updates fail and have to be repeated much more often. 

The obvious conclusion would be that there was a problem at my end, most likely with  my drives or possibly my broadband but I'm pretty sure that's not it. I have no problems downloading large files or updates for other services and although I've swapped the Steam installations from mechanical to SSD to external drives, it's much the same any way I try it. 

It's very anoying when it's a game I want to play but worse still when games I'm neither playing nor planning to start to patch and then hang, preventing me from closing them or doing anything else. Even logging out of Steam or rebooting won't stop that. As soon as I log back into Steam and before I can do anything at all to stop them, they begin again from where they left off .

When Once Human got stuck in that loop, the only way I could stop it was to go to the directory where the files were and manually delete them. Uninstalling via Steam didn't work because Steam constantly flagged the files as "Busy". I was able to "stop" the download but that just put it into a permanent state of "stopping" that never actually stopped.

I find the whole thing particularly galling because I never want any of my games to update until and unless I'm about to play them anyway. I don't want anything updating at all unless I specifically tell it to do so. On Steam I have everything I play regularly set to update only when I log in to that specific game.

Unfortunately, as many others have complained, Steam won't allow users to set Update On Play as a global default. You have to set it separately for every game and every time I fire up Steam it seems to find some old demo I'd forgotten about that now urgently needs to add Latvian language support or fix some essential problem with hairstyles.

Unless I'm fooling myself, nothing like this used to happen. I only started turning automatic updates off last year, when I noticed a problem. Before that, if there were any updates, they seemed to take a minute or two and involve a few megabytes, not a couple of hours and 70gb.

It's not just a problem with the downloading, either. Those 70gb always need to be verified and then installed and that takes even longer. And doesn't always work. Again, I'm perceiving this as a fairly new problem. I'm sure it wasn't happening a year ago. It's beginning to put me off using Steam a little.

DCUO, of course, isn't on Steam or rather that's not where I'm playing it. I access the game through Daybreak's own launcher, which is excellent. It never gives me any of these problems. The issue I'm having with DCUO today is a much more familiar and acceptable one; coming back after a break.

I haven't played the game for about nine months and as anyone who's ever played an MMORPG should know, a lot can change in under a year. In this case it's about 13gb that's changed or at least that's what the game is now installing. And doing it smoothly and quickly, I'm pleased to say.

In fact, it's all done, in less than the time it's taken me to write this. And I've passed the time usefully by writing this post, which also solves my problem of not having anything in mind to write about today.

Granted, it hasn't made for a very interesting post but you can't have everything. Now all I need to do is log in, take a couple of screenshots, promise to write something about the new update itself, when I've had a chance to play it, and that'll be my job done.

Thanks, Daybreak patcher! If only Steam was as reliable. It used to be...